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A pilot project in universal algebra to explore new ways to collaborate


Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that…

Proof assistant languages, such as Lean, provide a potential way to overcome these obstacles, and allow for large-scale collaborations involving professional mathematicians, the broader public, and/or AI tools to all contribute to a complex project, provided that it can be broken up in a modular fashion into smaller pieces that can be attacked without necessarily understanding all aspects of the project as a whole. More specifically I would like to propose the following (admittedly artificial) project as a pilot to further test out this paradigm, which was inspired by a MathOverflow question from last year, and discussed somewhat further on my Mastodon account shortly afterwards. The project I propose is to try to expand this Hasse diagram by a couple orders of magnitude, covering a significantly larger set of equations.

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